If it had not been for Barry Matlock, he would have been wearing his glasses. He would’ve got a good look at them then. There again, if it had not been for Barry Matlock, he never would have learnt what he learnt. What he learnt was there were people living in the woods. Not ordinary people like you or me or Barry Matlock, but people so small they must be magic. He knew lots of words for people like that, but they were all from fairy tales about the past. He wasn’t living in the past. He was living now, so he just called them people. 

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Henry feeds a coin into the slot. He aligns the grabber, holds his breath as golden claws glint, grip a pudgy tummy, and lift the baby. 

 

Arms waving and legs kicking, she is swung to the left, her smile glisten-gummy wide, eyes dark like the other babies he and his wife have had – and lost.

 

An inch before she reaches the chute, she slips from forcep-fingers, lands with a thud onto the pile of other babies.

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We agree we’ll wait, do up the cottage, adopt a rescue rabbit, maybe two.

By April the lanes are frothy with cow parsley. Every day you bring names home from the coffee shop.

‘Brett,’ you’ll say, shaking out your braid, your brow moist after pedalling up the hill to the village. ‘Barney, Austin, Bert. Ha! Bert and Ernie!’

‘Boy bunnies fight.’

‘Arabella and Araminta, then. If we get girls.’

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Summer 1995, I quit my job. No prospects, my bit of savings dwindling. Doubt on doubt had worn the contours of the world paper-thin, until bald emptiness stared blank at me from the reflective surfaces.

 

I hemorrhaged three hundred dollars on a summer pottery class. Back in college it had been something I loved. Slice up logs of clay and throw throw throw. The wheel circled like my mind, and in that spinning, the self faded. Six nights a week I went in for open studio and I threw bowl on bowl, trying to make the perfect curve that could return me to some kind of conviction.

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The first time Didi enters the dimly lit basement lab, she is told to sit facing a curved bank of monitors surrounded by snaking black cables and metal boxes winking green and yellow lights. The cameras light up all at once, revealing multiple Didis: left profile, right profile, scalp downward, chin upward, full frontal. The real Didi stares into her lap to escape her own uncanny valley. A force like the ocean’s undertow grabs at her. She grips the chair as if to keep from being ripped apart.

 

Is this normal? she asks the back of a white lab coat. The lab coat replies that it is. Perfectly normal.

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Soquorro, Aunt Soqui for short — don't call her Soquorro. She hates that. It means a cry for help.

 

When she was a kid, the boneheads on her block saw her coming and yelled, "Soquorro! Soquorro!" She crochets, she paints in oils, she volunteers at the hospital, and Soqui makes purses out of everything, because she can't throw anything away. It's a Depression-Era survival thing, and it's because of her mom. My grandmother.

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